William Proxmire, Maverick Democratic Senator From Wisconsin, Is Dead at 90

William Proxmire, a political maverick during 32 years in the Senate who crusaded against government waste and irritated presidents and lawmakers from both parties because of his contempt for the mutual back-scratching most politicians engage in, died yesterday in Sykesville, Md., about 40 miles from Washington. He was 90.

He died at the Copper Ridge Nursing Home, said Mindy Brandt, a spokeswoman for the home. Ms. Brandt said she could provide no further details.

Mr. Proxmire had Alzheimer's disease and had been out of the spotlight for more than a decade. He left the Senate in 1989.

A Democrat from Wisconsin, he was chairman of the Banking Committee and was involved in many important legislative battles, most notably successful drives to win Senate approval of a treaty outlawing genocide and rejection of money for a supersonic transport plane.

But he was best known for his Golden Fleece Awards, which he announced in monthly press releases to call attention to what he believed to be frivolous government spending. An award, for instance, went to the National Science Foundation in 1975 for spending $84,000 to learn why people fall in love.

Mr. Proxmire is also remembered for his regimen of daily exercise (in his prime, he jogged nearly 10 miles a day), his spartan diet, his hair transplants and face lift, his refusal to accept campaign donations or reimbursements for travel expenses and his string of not missing roll-call votes, which lasted more than 20 years.

Mr. Proxmire was first elected to the Senate in 1957 to fill the unexpired term of the late Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican who was censured for reckless attacks on those he accused of being communists or fellow travelers. Although he spent only a few hundred dollars on his campaigns, all of it out of his own pocket, Mr. Proxmire was easily re-elected five times.

His Golden Fleece Award, to gain publicity for his crusade against wasteful spending, became "as much a part of the Senate as quorum calls and filibusters," said Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the Democratic leader during part of Mr. Proxmire's career.

Speaking of the National Science Foundation's grant on falling in love, Mr. Proxmire said such a study was better left to "poets and mystics, to Irving Berlin, to thousands of high school and college bull sessions."

Another Golden Fleece Award went to the National Institute for Mental Health, which spent $97,000 to study, among other things, what went on in a Peruvian brothel. The researchers said they made repeated visits in the interests of accuracy.

The Federal Aviation Administration also felt Mr. Proxmire's wrath, for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the "length of the buttocks" and how their knees were arranged when they were seated. Other Fleece recipients were the Justice Department, for spending $27,000 to determine why prisoners wanted to get out of jail, and the Pentagon, for a $3,000 study to determine if people in the military should carry umbrellas in the rain.

When Mr. Proxmire set his mind to a task, he rarely relented until it was accomplished. For 19 years, he gave a speech on the floor nearly every morning the Senate was in session on behalf of the genocide treaty, more than 3,000 speeches in all. Finally, in 1986, the treaty was approved.

On the Banking Committee, he was tireless in pursuit of laws requiring lenders and credit card companies to disclose true lending rates and legislation enabling consumers to determine their credit ratings. He also pushed for more competition in financial services.

His penny-pinching was the bane not just of defense contractors but also of fellow senators, whose raises and large campaign funds he regularly opposed. Many of his colleagues thought he was a self-centered grandstander.

Generally, he was a liberal, and he was a fierce opponent of the war in Vietnam, but he never toed the party line.

In 1982, a convention of feminists booed him because he had voted against liberalizing abortion rights. Democrats were also upset when he voted to approve the conservative William H. Rehnquist as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

He was a strong advocate of the expensive system of dairy price supports, important to Wisconsin farmers, but his constituents sometimes accused him of failing to bring home the bacon, as other senators did.

On one occasion, the people of LaFarge wanted federal money to improve a lake. Congress was more than willing, but Senator Proxmire opposed the plan, calling it a waste. The lake became a mudhole, and somebody in LaFarge put up a sign calling it Lake Proxmire.

The senator had a bittersweet relationship with New York. After he was named chairman of the powerful Banking Committee in 1975, he worked hard to win approval of a $2.3 billion federal loan guarantee for New York City, then on the brink of bankruptcy.

Having helped save New York, Mr. Proxmire then publicly criticized it as profligate and excoriated the City Council for seeking a 50 percent raise. He also said that municipal workers made too much money and that their pensions and welfare benefits were too cushy. He added that the politicians presiding over such a mess seemed rather silly to defend continuing free tuition at the City University.

Edward William Proxmire was born Nov. 11, 1915, in Lake Forest, Ill., the son of Dr. Theodore Proxmire, a prominent physician and steadfast Republican, and his wife, the former Adele Flanigan. He had an older brother and a younger sister, both of whom died long ago.

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When he was about 6, he saw a movie starring William S. Hart, the legendary cowboy of the silent screen. He was so taken with Mr. Hart's heroism that he insisted from that day on that he be called not Edward but William.

The family was well-to-do, and he was sent to the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., and then to Yale, where he was an English major.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1938 and immediately enrolled at Harvard, where he became a teaching fellow and earned a master's degree in business administration. He then went to New York for an entry-level job at J. P. Morgan.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Mr. Proxmire enlisted in the Army as a private. He was assigned to counterintelligence work and was discharged in 1946 as a first lieutenant.

He returned to Harvard, earned a second master's degree -- this one in public administration -- and moved to Wisconsin to be a reporter for The Capital Times in Madison.

"They fired me after I'd been there seven months, for labor activities and impertinence," he once said, conceding that his dismissal was merited.

Mr. Proxmire stayed in his adopted state, worked briefly for a union newspaper and had a weekly radio show called "Labor Sounds Off," sponsored by the American Federation of Labor.

In 1950, he ran for the Wisconsin Assembly and won, defeating a six-term incumbent in the Democratic primary and trouncing his Republican opponent in the general election.

He then decided he wanted to be governor and ran three times unsuccessfully, twice against Walter J. Kohler, an incumbent Republican, and once against another Republican, Vernon Thompson.

When Mr. Proxmire ran for the Senate seat left vacant by Mr. McCarthy's death in 1957, his opponent once again was Mr. Kohler. But this time, Mr. Proxmire won.

From the beginning of his career in Washington, Mr. Proxmire was a loner, frequently at odds not just with Republicans but also with members of his ownparty.

Early in his first term, he clashed with the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, because he thought Johnson was compromising too much on civil rights legislation. He also did not like Johnson's support of tax breaks for the oil industry.

In the early 1960's, he opposed some of President John F. Kennedy's nominations, even filibustering one for 19 hours.

His aversion to spending money extended to himself. Throughout his career, he wore inexpensive suits, paid for his own plane trips and spent less than $200 on his campaigns, with some of the money used to buy stamps to return donations sent by constituents.

"I think fully two-thirds of the senators could get re-elected without spending a penny," he once said.

His first marriage, to Elsie B. Rockefeller, a great-grandniece of John D. Rockefeller, ended in divorce in 1955. The following year he married Ellen Hodges Sawall, a former executive secretary of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that in addition to his wife, Mr. Proxmire is survived by their son, Douglas, who lives in McLean, Va.; two children from his first marriage, Theodore, of Bethesda, Md., and Elsie Proxmire Zwerner of Scottsdale, Ariz.; Mrs. Proxmire's children by her first marriage, Mary Ellen Poulos of Milwaukee and Jan Licht of Naperville, Ill.; and nine grandchildren.

In retirement, Mr. Proxmire had a small office in the Library of Congress, and for several years before he began to feel the symptoms of Alzheimer's, he jogged to his office, just as he had to the Capitol.

Tall, thin and bald as a young man, Mr. Proxmire was unusually vain about his looks. He had a series of hair transplants and a face lift, and in 1973, he published a book about staying in shape: "You Can Do It: Senator Proxmire's Exercise, Diet and Relaxation Plan."